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by epistasis 5605 days ago
iOS tries hard to make web apps first class citizens. And the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript parts that make this possible are in HTML5.

It's not that Apple doesn't understand the internet, it's that many geeks want "native" apps, rather than having web apps on mobile devices. Apple tolerates these apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden.
2 comments
kbutler 5605 days ago
>Apple tolerates these [native] apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden.

Geeks wanting native apps, and Apple reluctantly going along may have been the case when the iPhone & App Store first began, but Apple has long since realized that the app channel is very valuable to users and to the platform, and that control over that channel will be hugely profitable.

If Apple really wanted to have webapps be first class iOS citizens, they would provide Phonegap capabilities standardized in the native browser (http://www.phonegap.com/).

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epistasis 5605 days ago
PhoneGap seems interesting, but I don't fully understand it yet. Which of its capabilities should be added to the browser? Should they be standardized in HTML5 or should they be part of a devices OS?
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semanticist 5605 days ago
PhoneGap provides, if you include its JavaScript file in your PhoneGap-wrapped web app, JavaScript APIs to the camera, stored photos, the address book, and some other stuff.

Some of this stuff is in 'HTML5', like geolocation, but much of it isn't. Apple could have provided custom APIs to the camera and so on and allowed people to access it from their iOS-specific web apps.

The way that an API gets to be a standard is that someone implements it and people use it - if Apple had included a camera access API in Mobile Safari, it probably would have found its way into a spec and been implemented by other browsers.

Your last question seems confused: HTML/CSS rendering and JavaScript processing is part of the device's OS (in the form of its web browser). No browser does everything that's in the standard, and most browsers do things that aren't in the standard. Just adding it to the spec for HTML5 wouldn't be directly meaningful.

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GHFigs 5605 days ago
a camera access API in Mobile Safari, it probably would have found its way into a spec and been implemented by other browsers

To give the curious an idea of what that might look like: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/c...

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semanticist 5605 days ago
Exactly. I would be surprised if people working on WebKit for Apple weren't involved in those kind of discussions, and would fully expect Mobile Safari to support a workable device API.

I wonder how long before iOS development is like WebOS development?

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justincormack 5605 days ago
PhoneGap sees itself as a temporary measure and everything should be a browser capability. They bridge the OS capabilities that are not available now in the browser.
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orangecat 5604 days ago
it's that many geeks want "native" apps, rather than having web apps on mobile devices.

The app store didn't get to be a huge success by appealing to geeks. Native apps really do have significant advantages over web apps (and vice versa).

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